Busy Paralympians Brent Lakatos, Stefanie Reid making marriage work

Paralympics 2012: Brent Lakatos, Stefanie Reid making marriage work

LONDON – The pre-Paralympics bet between Brent Lakatos and Stefanie Reid was that whoever wins a gold medal doesn’t have to do the dishes.

So far, it’s a wash – pardon the pun – with each earning a silver medal on Sunday. But given that they’re rarely in the same household and would seem to have little time in their busy schedules to actually do dishes, we’re guessing it was more a line for the media than an actual wager.

There are a few husband-and-wife duos competing at the 2012 Paralympics, but none of them quite like Lakatos and Reid.

Lakatos, a 32-year-old paraplegic as a result of a hockey accident when he was six, is an Inuvik-born, Quebec-raised computer analyst from Dallas who races his wheelchair for Canada.

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Reid, a 27-year-old New Zealand-born, Ontario-raised, part-time student who splits her time between Dallas and London, is a single-leg amputee competing for Great Britain – four years after she won a bronze for Canada at the Beijing Olympics.

Turning her back on the maple leaf to make an opportunistic jump to the Paralympic home team? The blunt-spoken and eloquent Reid says don’t even go there. After all, she gave up the opportunity to go to medical school in Canada.

“People say you’re trying to cash in,” she told a British newspaper a week ago. “It’s the Paralympics, we’re not in it because we’re going to make money. If I’d wanted to make money I’d have become a plastic surgeon in [Los Angeles] specializing in breast enhancement.”

See what we mean.

Lakatos earned his first Paralympic medal Sunday evening in his third Games by finishing second in the men’s T53 400 metres. It came eight hours after Reid just missed gold in the women’s T43/T44 long jump.

“We’re on par right now,” said a grinning Lakatos, who will have other shots at gold in the 100, 200 and 800.

Reid was eighth in the T44 women’s 100 metres late Sunday night, 90 minutes after her husband’s race.

Lakatos, who played wheelchair basketball at the University of Texas, had two top-six finishes at Beijing. Since then, he’s been racking up a series of personal bests.

“I’ve got a faster top speed and I’ve got the best equipment I’ve ever had,” he said after finishing .47 seconds back of gold medallist Li Huzhao of China. “I wanted gold, but the last 100 metres my arms were just burning. I didn’t have enough to sprint.”

He and Reid, who grew up in Toronto, and went to Queen’s University to study biochemistry, married in 2008, but have rarely lived in the same country, let alone the same house. Her decision to move to London in 2009 and switch allegiances to Great Britain was not overly surprising.

Her mother is from Scarborough, England and her father from Glasgow, Scotland, and ran a Scottish-themed pub in Canada. Her parents were employed in the hotel industry and the family lived in Britain, Hawaii, Canada and Britain again before settling in Toronto. She says her parents never lost their patriotism and she felt that competing for Great Britain was her “calling.”

It was also an opportunity to train and compete with a better-funded and more successful British program.

“We discussed it a lot and I was actually pushing her in that direction,” said Lakatos. “I thought it would be a good decision for her, just the training environment, the coaching, the high-performance centres, everything. It’s a great, great place for her … to get her in the best shape she can to have the best results.”

Says Reid: “I’m in this for excellence and Britain did have the best infrastructure. They went around the world and hunted the best coaches.”

While in high school, where she was a straight-A student, Reid, who had been into swimming, basketball and ballet, discovered rugby – “I loved the aggression” – and was seriously looking at applying to universities in New Zealand.

But at 16, while out on a tubing excursion on a lake with friends, she was struck by motorboat. The propeller sliced across her back and right leg. By the time she got to hospital, she had lost so much blood that doctors thought she would die.

She survived but doctors were forced to amputate her right leg below the knee.

“It’s a strange thing to be 16 and look different from everybody else,” says Reid. “I’d done sport for so long, it was who I defined myself as, and it was taken away from me. I didn’t know who I was anymore.”

At Queen’s, however, she discovered athletics and quickly won an invitation to a Paralympic World Cup. She won her bronze for Canada in 2008 in the 200 metres.

In Britain, the slim, dark-haired Reid, has became one of the faces of the Paralympics. She has her own website, which features a startling photo of her in a junkyard, standing atop the hood of a smashed-up car while clad in her running gear and wearing her carbon fibre track prosthesis.

She’s become a darling of the British media.

“They’re crazy,” says Lakatos. “She’s all over the place, on every [British Petroleum gas] station and everything. I saw the poster of her before I actually saw her when I got to London.”

Lakatos says they’ve managed to make the long-distance marriage work by “talking on the phone quite a bit, Skype and e-mail. And then when we get to spend time together, it’s great.

“Hopefully there’ll be more time for that after all the races are over.”

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